Sigmund Freud Quotes
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The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.
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One becomes gradually accustomed to a new realization of the nature of 'happiness': one has to assume happiness when Fate does not carry out all its threats simultaneously.
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The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
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Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
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The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
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Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.
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Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
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What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.
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In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
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The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
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Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
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The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
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Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.
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The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
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America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.
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Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.
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I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
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These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.
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The world is no nursery.
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Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
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As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
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Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.
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I like to avoid concessions to faint-heartedness. One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by little in substance too.
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Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.